Month: August 2009

OK, I’m taking the bait here. Nothing got me more riled up than the Shadow Complex fiasco last week. The whole thing was rather ridiculous. So here’s me weighing on the issue about the issue.

“Controversy” is an over-used word. If a small group doesn’t like something and they express their outrage often enough on the Internet, then it can seem like anythign can be a controversy. For example, Ikea changed its font from Futura to Verdana, a fact that wouldn’t raise the eyebrow of most people I know. But it’s the select few who are up in arms about the change and that grabs the media attention. It may be an important issue to those font geeks, but it’s not exactly the fall of Western civilization compared to say health care reform or the war in Afghanistan. In fact, anyone concerned about a stupid font should readjust their priorities.

Give any malcontent a microphone and they can make a splinter seem like a crucifixition. That seems to be happening with some “controversies” in video games. The Fat Princess flap was overblown. While two feminist bloggers were appalled about the idea of feeding the titular characters cake until they grew obese, the rest of the gaming public didn’t seem to mind. They took the game’s quirky humor in stride and the downloadable game has enjoyed brisk sales since its release.

Again, “controversy” — that word has a funny way of popping up doesn’t it? — showed up again with the release of Shadow Complex. Apparently, a few people objected to the involvement of Orson Scott Card because of his anti-gay stance. Nevermind that he didn’t write the game nor did he have a direct role in its creation. Shadow Complex just happened to take place in a universe that Card created.

Thankfully, the apparent call to boycott didn’t have much of an effect. The game set an Xbox Live Arcade record for one week of sales and it’s received rave reviews from critics. Frankly, I don’t mind these groups having voices but what I do care about is the ridiculous attention the gaming media gives to these issues. Maybe this navel gazing is one of the growing pains as the medium matures.

But lately, there’s too much hysteria to every perceived “controversy,” too much hand-wringing when it comes to the smallest slight. The whole environment reminds me of sports talk radio, where anything an athlete or coach does sets a fireworks no matter how trivial. I’m just waiting for the flame wars.

Yes, it’s entertaining and I’m sure it generates a lot of clicks to mention a controversy (The newest one seems to be a complaint about using Kurt Cobain’s likeness in Guitar Hero 5.), but after a while, it gets inane, and it overshadows more important issues. What about a rising cost of games? Or what about stretching that gaming dollar in a bad economy? While some issues are important to some, members of the media should use more discretion when covering apparent “controversies” or better yet maybe we should save the word for things that really matter.

Yes, you’re reading that right. Dark Sector, a game that once sold for $59.99, is now on sale on Amazon for the ridiculous price of 10 cents. Yes, if you have a dime buried in your couch cushions, you can afford this game. The homeless guy hunting for plastic bottles in the trash bin can probably pick this up and make a profit at GameStop. Maybe. If this whole video game thing doesn’t work out for Dark Sector, I suppose it has a future as currency. Maybe we can replace the dime with the Dark Sector disc. Of course, that would make buying a a bag of chips at the vending machine harder and Dark Sector discs would be hard to fit in your back pocket …

APOCALYPSE! DISNEY TO BUY MARVEL: It’s a crazy world when things like this happen. Today, Disney announced that it will be buying Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion. Yes, Spider-Man will be working for the Mouse now.

From a video game perspective, having access to all those Marvel characters will help Disney with the guy side of things. Maybe the company can now avoid being known as the maker of all those Hannah Montana and High School Musical games and expand the brand to superhero titles via its Touchstone Pictures label. Quite frankly, I’d take Spider-Man over Turok any day.

BEATLES MONEY: A report in the L.A. Times says that Viacom paid the Beatles rights holders at least $10 million to use the band’s music and likeness in the game. The report also said that the folks who own those rights will be paid $40 million in royalties if all goes as expected.

Those are big numbers, but what’s really interesting is that Viacom may be getting out of the fake plastic instrument business in general. And from the sound of the article, it sounds as if Activision is more than happy to pick up the slack.

GOD OF WAR ON BLU-RAY: If you haven’t had time to play the previous God of War games, you now have no excuse. The PlayStation blog announced that the God of War Collection will be available this holiday season.

You can play the first and second games of the trilogy in 720 HD with a bump to the graphics and trophy support. Then in a couple of months, you’ll be all ready for the epic that will be God of War III. But if you want the full story, I suggest you also play Chains of Olympus to find out why Kratos is so angry all the time.

ROCKSTAR TITLES COMING TO IPHONE: Although Gameloft may have beaten Rockstar to the punch when it comes to open-world crime games on the iPhone, that doesn’t mean the developer is shying away from the platform. Far from it, the team seems up to be throwing its hat in the iPhone ring.

Armor Games is one of my favorite Web game developers, and This is the Only Level proves why. The designer, jmtbo2, creates some compelling content using rather simple concepts. I Love Traffic was an interesting project where players had to control traffic lights. Achievement Unlocked is a game that plays off the need to earn every single achievement/trophy.

Along the same lines, Armor Games’ This is the Only Level tries to see how many ways you can complete one level. The goal is pretty simple: Get the blue elephant from one orange pipe to another. The only problem is that the rules for each level is tweaked each time. Sometimes, you have to move the elephant with arrow keys; other times, you’ll have to move him with the mouse. Sometimes, you’ll have to press the red button on the center platform; other times, you’ll have to fight a pretty stiff wind.

The title for each stage gives a clue about how to solve a level. The amount of variations are amazing, and Armor Games run the gamut. In a way, the game is almost artsy. It reminds me of an Andy Warhol piece if Andy Warhol were alive and making video games.

Play Time: Each level is fairly short, but you have to complete a lot of them. Even if you try to speed run through this, it will take you more than five minutes to go through 30 levels. But trying to solve each variation is amazing.

The final day of the second annual Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival turned out to be more about who wasn’t on the bill than who was.

The Beastie Boys – which were originally set to headline Sunday’s show at the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, but had to bow out when vocalist Adam Yauch was diagnosed with cancer – were definitely missed. People were even talking about how M.I.A., the main support act on Sunday, had “tweeted” about how disappointed she was about the Beasties’ absence, and that was none too thrilled about the fill-in headliner, the comedic-rock duo Tenacious D.

M.I.A., however, should have been more concerned with her own set. The one she ended up delivering was dreadfully incompetent. She lacked direction onstage, stalled for time and, in general, put on a set seemed to turn off as many fans as it turned on. Yet, this wasn’t just M.I.A. putting on a half-hearted gig because she missed the Beasties – it was, as I’m beginning to understand, her regular operating procedure. Local fans should know that M.I.A.’s Outside Lands gig was only marginally worse than what she put on earlier this year at Coachella.

In all, the Sunday show felt anticlimactic, which was a shame given what happened over the previous two days. And that wasn’t the fault of Tenacious D, which worked hard for fans’ money. It was just that the day was lacking in other ways – most troublingly, a legitimate headliner like the festival hosted on Friday (Pearl Jam) and Saturday (the Dave Matthews Band).

Even some of the usually reliable names on the bill, including Modest Mouse, seemed to limp their way through their sets.

I chose to watch Modest Mouse instead of Dead Weather – with seven stages going throughout the day, no one can catch everything worth seeing. That may have been a mistake since I had some people telling me Jack White’s latest project put on a tremendous outing. Or, maybe not, since others gave Dead Weather thumbs down. I am still intrigued enough to hope that Dead Weather comes back through town. (I also missed Calexico, which was scheduled during that same Modest Mouse/Dead Weather time frame – it’s really not fair that the three acts I most wanted to see at Outside Lands on Sunday were onstage at the same time.)

I did see John Vanderslice, the Avett Brothers, Matt & Kim, Band of Horses and Atmosphere, yet none of those sets were overly impressive. On the upside, at least I got to see those acts – which is the true benefit of a multi-stage festival like Outside Lands.

Sure, the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival still has a way to go before it can be ranked among the country’s best large-scale music gatherings, a group that would include the Monterey Jazz Festival, Southern California’s Coachella and Texas’ South by Southwest. But it’s clearly on its way.

The second annual festival, held in glorious weather conditions Friday through Sunday at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, was an improvement over last year’s inaugural Outside Lands in several ways. Continue Reading →

OK, Jason Mraz isn’t the artist we’d want to listen to marooned for the rest of our lives on a desert island, but here at Outside Lands, on an insanely beautiful day with an even more insanely nice vibe blowing through the grounds like the breeze off the ocean, his energetic, melodic, romantic sound makes perfect sense. Plus, the chicks dig it when a guy dances all goofy on strage. Place just went nut as he broke into “I’m Yours.” Hey, it could be a lot worse. He could be Jack Johnson.

(Report from Day 2)D’oh! Walked across festival grounds to catch Street Sweeper Social Club, the new supergroup with Oakland’s Boots Riley and axeman supreme Tom Morello and caught … the last half of the last song. What can we say; you pays your dollar and you takes your chances at these festivals. Should have stayed at the main stage Raphael Saadiq, who sounded sublime. Walk wasn’t a complete loss, though. Heard Portugal. The Man cover Harry Nilsson’s “One.”

Pearl Jam was the headliner for Day One of the second annual Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival. Yet, the true star of the show was the weather.

It was a glorious day by the Bay, as temperatures remained warm well into the evening on Friday. Indeed, some people could even be heard making the unusual complaint – that it was just too hot in San Francisco. Thus, the tens of thousands of fans that turned out to Golden Gate Park for the concert never needed to put on their jackets and sweatshirts, even after the sun went down. Continue Reading →

Didn’t see any knickers being thrown at Mr. Jones. But didn’t stick around for the whole set, so maybe panties are flying as I right this. A huge crowd, which included my former girlfriend college (hi Kirstin!), turned out to see the legendary Welsh performer. I thought he sounded pretty good, but others I talked to disagreed. The best part was when a Welsh fan turned to me and, with much passion and certainty, described how Jones wrote the song “Green Grass of Home” about the, umm, green grass in Wales. (The song was actually written by Claude “Curly” Putman Jr and originally made popular by Porter Wagoner.) I love it when people grab “facts” out of thin air. Indeed, I used to do all the time. =)